Archive for the ‘Reality’ Category

When theists say that the universe exists because of God, they are saying that the universe exists, because of some agent they know: that make those theists vastly superior to us, simple miscreants, who do not happen to be acquainted with what, or who, created all and everything. Surely, those superior beings should lead us? So what sounds metaphysical, by asserting a “God” boils down to claiming a higher place in an all too human hierarchy.

“Universe” means literally, “turned into one”, whereas “multiverse” would be: “turned into many”. So the set of all multiverses is the universe. (So the alleged existence of “multiverse” is akin to Bertrand Russell’s famous paradox of the set whose elements are not elements of itself; Russell’s paradox brought down mathematical logic as it had been known prior; present day physicists have been repeating that mistake, from lack of basic culture in the matter of mathematical logic!)

If we were to claim, and, or, even worse, have the feeling, that we know why the universe exists, we would be claiming, or have the impression, that we were God. This is not the business of physics, only the business of those who want us to be guided by absolutism.

Alexander the Great, seeing his blood flow, asked himself that question: am I a God? His Greek and Macedonian companions laughed him off. Later, on the advice of his mom, Olympia, Alexander ordered the old, most senior generalissimo Antipater, a companion of Alexander’s father, from Greece to Babylon. Antipater refused to obey. Antipater’s youngest son was Alexander’s page. Alexander found himself ceasing to be, before he could even organize his affairs.

We are both everything and nothing relative to the universe. The key to wisdom, is to keep a balance.

The universe is, what it is. Science can describe it, not explain how it came to be. That is the proper mood that wisdom should embrace. Embracing the humility of reality, so we can unleash the power of truth.

Let theologians, dinosaurian conservatives, the Politically Correct and the Perfect Cretins, among others, try to learn this: We have to embrace the way things are, before we can hope to change what needs to be changed. And there is plenty of the latter. So stop claiming some human beings know why there is all there is. They don’t. They, and, or, their supporters just want everything you could possibly imagine, and then more.

In it, Sean points out notions which I have exposed in the past, but are worth repeating, as many physicists, let alone philosophers and theologians, don’t get them. First of all Sean basically points out that the universe just is (as I said above, by definition of this neuronal activity!). And secondly Sean Carroll, a famous Cal Tech cosmologist, points out that all too many professional physicists don’t even understand that physics, as presently understood, doesn’t explain the universe! In other words, as I have said for decades, all too many physicists take themselves for God! (That is in the same meta category as Niels Bohr’s famous retort to Albert Einstein:”Stop telling God what to do!“)

…“The right question to ask isn’t “Why did this happen?”, but “Could this have happened in accordance with the laws of physics?” As far as the universe and our current knowledge of the laws of physics is concerned, the answer is a resounding “Yes.” The demand for something more — a reason why the universe exists at all — is a relic piece of metaphysical baggage we would be better off to discard.

This perspective gets pushback from two different sides. On the one hand we have theists, who believe that they can answer why the universe exists, and the answer is God. As we all know, this raises the question of why God exists; but aha, say the theists, that’s different, because God necessarily exists, unlike the universe which could plausibly have not. The problem with that is that nothing exists necessarily, so the move is pretty obviously a cheat. I didn’t have a lot of room in the paper to discuss this in detail (in what after all was meant as a contribution to a volume on the philosophy of physics, not the philosophy of religion), but the basic idea is there. Whether or not you want to invoke God, you will be left with certain features of reality that have to be explained by “and that’s just the way it is.” (Theism could possibly offer a better account of the nature of reality than naturalism — that’s a different question — but it doesn’t let you wiggle out of positing some brute facts about what exists.)

The other side are those scientists who think that modern physics explains why the universe exists. It doesn’t! One purported answer — “because Nothing is unstable” — was never even supposed to explain why the universe exists; it was suggested by Frank Wilczek as a way of explaining why there is more matter than antimatter. But any such line of reasoning has to start by assuming a certain set of laws of physics in the first place. Why is there even a universe that obeys those laws? This, I argue, is not a question to which science is ever going to provide a snappy and convincing answer. The right response is “that’s just the way things are.” It’s up to us as a species to cultivate the intellectual maturity to accept that some questions don’t have the kinds of answers that are designed to make us feel satisfied.”

Note 2: Swiss citizen Tariq Ramadan, the world’s most famous Islamist propagandist, holder of two chairs (no less!) at Oxford University, and now in a French prison, was going around the world grievously beating and raping women. Why? Because, precisely, he wanted everything, and that included beating up handicapped women. Even now, as he sits in prison, he enjoys his power: immensely powerful organizations behind him, the sort who made him an Oxford Don, are threatening many more women, who also want to file complaints against Ramadan, but are afraid to do so. The human species is naturally metaphysical. Ramadan wanted to create a universe where he and his ilk could hurt and terrorize women at will. This is not any different from telling us that Muhammad flew to Jerusalem, the capital of Israel, on a winged horse: it is outrageous, but it creates a universe, and its cause (and in this case Islamists are the cause of said universe!)

In Sub-Quantum Patrice’s Reality (SQPR), Matter Waves are real (in Quantum Theory Copenhagen Interpretation (QTCI) the Matter Waves are just probability waves of… knowledge… hence the insistence that “it came from bit“). There has been no direct evidence that Matter Waves were real. So far. But times they are changing as the other one, Bob Dylan, a gifted yet not too deep singer who got his Nobel today, said.

Both Dark Matter and Dark Energy are consequences of SQPR. So: Observing both Dark Matter and Dark Energy constitute proofs of SQPR.

The prediction of the deviation of light by the Sun was twice with “General Relativity” than the one predicted in Newtonian Mechanics. The effect was minute, and detected only in grazing starlight, during Solar eclipse of 29 May 1919 (by the ultra famous British astronomer and physicist Eddington). Thus, as 95% of the universe matter-energy is from Dark Matter or Dark Energy, my prediction carries more weight.

SPQR also predict “fuel-less” production, in a variant of the effect which produces Dark Matter in SQPR (also called PSQR below):

Dark Matter Pushes, Patrice Ayme Says. Explaining NASA’s Findings?

How does Dark Matter create propulsion? Well, that it does is evident: just look at galactic clusters (more details another day). A Matter Wave will expand, until it singularizes. If it expands enough, it will become so big that it will lose a (smaller) piece of itself during re-singularization. That piece is the Dark Matter.

Thus visualize this: take a cavity C, and bounce a Matter Wave around it (there is plenty of direct theoretical and experimental evidence that this can be arranged).

Make a hole H in the boundary of C (this is not different from the Black Body oven the consideration of which led Planck to discover the Quantum).

Hence a push. A Dark Matter push. (Notice: the Dark Matter is created inside the device, it doesn’t have to be “gathered”. DM propellant speed could be many times the speed of light, hence great efficiency…)

The (spectacular) effect has been apparently observed by NASA.

Does this violate Newton’s Third Law? (As it has been alleged.)

No. I actually just used Newton’s Third Law, the Action = Reaction law. So SQPR explains the observed effect in combination with the Action= Reaction Law, “proving” both.

How could we prove SQPR? There should be a decrease of energy-momentum after a while, and the decrease should equal the observed push exactly.

Patrice Ayme’

***

Warning: The preceding considerations are at the edge of plausible physics. (Groups of dissenting physicists are always busy making theories where Dark Matter does not exist (and they should!) Should they be right, the preceding is nonsense. The consensus, though, is that Dark Matter exists, but is explained by a variant of the so-called “Standard Model”, using “Supersymmetry”, or “WIMPs”, or “Axions”. My own theory, SQPR is, by far, the most exotic, as it uses an hypothesized Sub Quantic Reality, obtained by throwing Quantum Theory Copenhagen Interpretation, QTCI, through the window, as a first order theory.)

I am very transgender in mentality. In both directions, of course. Whatever that exactly means. I also know that gender is a matter of an hormonal landscape, in which chromosome identity (XX, XY, XXY, etc.) is only one factor. However, that does not mean I throw reality out of the window.

Humanity is steering the planet, towards oblivion. The obvious cause is that we are led by greedy, clownish “leaders” who masquerade as “elected”. In truth, they are not leading, they are just middle-men who hope to make a good “career” by pleasing the masters, like the butlers they are.

Yet the situation is worse than it looks. Consider the middle Middle Ages. The European Middle Ages, but I could adjust the same discourse to the Indian, Chinese, or Japanese Middle Ages. Europe is a clearer, better known case. It was a time of princesses, princes, and devotion to the Christian god. As Sade, Nietzsche, and various mafiosi observed, it was just the opposite: the European aristocracy was barely more than the largest organized crime operation in the world, and the wars it organized, a way to physically and mentally divided the people they subjugated into minced meat (when truly necessary).

Agnes Sorel Forced Charles VII To Make War, Or She Would Bed The English King Instead, As Eleanor Did.

Wedding the English king after divorcing the French king is what Eleanor, Duchesse d’Aquitaine had done earlier, and had many children. All subsequent English and French monarchs were her descendants for generations.

What was wrong with the Middle Ages?

The mood. This veneration of people such as Eleanor.

The “Christian” mood of the populace, the fake-Christian, hysterical mood of the leaders. The mood, superstitious and full of tribal anger (consider the pogroms against Jews, Cathars, Waldenses/Protestants, “witches”; and the crisscrossing of Europe by war parties and related “grandes companies” and other armies of brigands).

The superstitious mood is entangled by the celebrity mood, and both are adverse to the triumph of wisdom. The celebrity mood made people look up to princes and princesses (the word, originally used when the Roman Republic was dying, comes from “princeps”, first, and Augustus loved it).

Germaine Greer once at the edge of feminism, is now condemned as somebody so bad by a tribe so well-organized, a university she was supposed to talk at, implied that she should not be allowed to speak in public (as they will not insure her safety). The loudly “transgender” pseudo-tribe has condemned Greer. And, as usual, there is the public discourse, and the real one I suspect (below).

In Reality Greer Attacked The Celebrities Paid To Attack Reality, The Kadarshians

[In the USA, everything is bigger, compare with the “Dame de Beaute'”, the Fifteenth Century Agnes Sorel, above. And Kim Kadarshian is the specialist of reality, or so you will find, Rollingstone asserts, once you enter her real world…]

Tribalism is the way out of metaphysical loneliness. One advantage of “careers” is that they manufacture tribalism. An advantage of hostility strongly shared, let alone mass hatred, is that it creates a fake world solved by tribalism, and the tribal cement to go with.

Witness what is going on in Israel/Palestine. The best solution there is a global secular republic (or union) containing two states therein (a bit like the European Union model).

Chris Snuggs: ““philosophy” means “love of knowledge”, which has actually little to do with what philosophers do. What today is “science” was once “philosophy”. What today’s philosophy is is basically “speculation about the nonscientific” or ” speculative musing about the meaning of life and the processes of thought and its expression through language.””

Patrice: “Linguistic” philosophy has grown malignant indeed. Yet, philosophy, the philosophical method, is more needed than ever, and that is exactly why it is more dead than ever in the plutocratic system, and its universities. There, what passes for philosophy is all too often just garbage.

Watch what I said about the importance of moods. I am applying the philosophical method: telling the truth, sticking to reality. Mood calculus includes, crucially, the unsaid, and unexpressed.

The deepest questions at the edge of science, from Lamarckism to what it means when galaxies recess faster than light, or whether high energy physicists know what they are talking about, involve state of the art philosophy.

However, indeed, Chris, what’s often taught in philosophy departments is abysmal, indeed. This has to do with the fact that it takes (say) a decade to study all of science at high enough a level beyond high school, to have a fair idea of the scientific landscape.

Society, let alone universities, do not view this sort of global knowledge as valuable. Plato required the equivalent of a graduate level knowledge of mathematics. Nearly all “philosophers” now don’t know anymore calculus than Trudeau, Cameron, Hollande, Putin, Xi, Roussef, or Obama.

But of the degeneracy of philosophy has to do with the rise of “analytic philosophy” in Anglo-Saxon countries. Russell, its founder found it had become thoroughly unworthy. On the continent, the derangement was due to the rise of fascism (Soviet or Mussolini style).

What did the veteran feminist, Ms Greer say, which supposedly infuriated some transgender fanatics?

“I just don’t think that surgery turns a man into a woman. A perfectly permissable view. I mean, an un-man is not necessarily a woman. We don’t really know what women are and I think that a lot of women are female impersonators, because our notion of who we are is not authentic, and so I am not surprised men are better at impersonating women than women are. Not a surprise, but it’s not something I welcome.”

Surgery, as practiced today, is little different from what the best prehistoric doctors did successfully: amputation. OK, in the future, we will grow organs. It is studied. It is the future. But not yet a fact.

Kim Kadarshian seems to believe that reality, or rather, learning how to rape reality, is her business model. Said she, talking about her transgender, surgery challenged step-father, now a pseudo-woman:

“He lives his life the way he wants, a really authentic life, and he was like, ‘If you can’t be authentic and you can’t live your life, what do you have?’”

You want authenticity? Ask the Kadarshians, they know all about it. They accept plastic, any day.

Germaine Greer has accused TV star Caitlyn Jenner of emulating the limelight of other (female) members of the Kadarshians family.

The Australian-born feminist courted controversy by asserting that “misogyny played a big part” in the rumors that Glamour magazine would give Jenner its woman of the year award.

Jenner, who was born Bruce, and got many Olympic medals as a male, was married to Kris Jenner, Kim Kardashian’s mother, until they filed for divorce early last year, and cannot get enough of his celebrity status, apparently.

Greer says that so-called transgender women, who, admittedly, began life as males, before undergoing surgery and hormone treatments to “become women”, are “not women”. Greer says that they do not “look like, sound like or behave like women”. Instead they behave as males who want to steal everything from women, including femininity. So they trample not just on reality, but on justice too.

Clearly those transgender creatures, not to say creations, are not females (that requires XX chromosomes). But to pretend that they are females, because some people just said so, is the effect the owners of the Main Stream Media, all very rich men, are after: namely destroy any common sense, and make a religion out of that destruction.

Not to say that attack against reality are only the work of transgender crazies. Giving the Nobel Prize to drone crazy Obama was not just funny, but unreal. And not that this was started yesterday. Among the pious, ever since Viceroy Lord Mountbatten said so, Gandhi has been viewed as a paragon of pacifism. Never mind that pacifist Gandhi, praying like an Hindu, helped to bring colossal, multi-generational, religious strife, 15 million refugees, & millions dead. (No wonder he got depressed.)

Christianism to is a religion of peace and love, especially regarding Cathars (exterminated), Jews (pogromized), Muslims (roasting their children a must when hungry, see the First Crusade), or any sort of intellectuals or printers (burned alive). And Joan of Arc, the one of the same king as Agnes Sorel, of course saved France, or so pseudo-French fanatics, by re-igniting a war with London which lasted another four centuries with real guns, and which France is still busy losing, to this day…

Reality is a hard mistress, and the one which always wins. Yet, we control it, to a great extent now, because we are the nonlinear species, ready, even mandated, for immortality. Not that we have a choice. Humanity is the “why” species. Also the “no” species. Yes, no and why, for the God(s), incarnated, for real. And the problem the gods have is whether they want to aspire to grab Kim’s fake reality, or stick to exercising our reality muscles.

Some people go around, and brandish the “Multiverse”. Of course, the “Multiverse” exists, in one’s brain. The brain, among other things, extends all over imagination. Out there, among the galaxies, in the real world, there is no reason to suppose there is a “Multiverse, whatsoever.

It is basically something to sell books with. Or, just as with evil minded religions, for some physicists to claim they are like gods and can believe in something really absurd, and grotesquely self-contradictory:

There is No Universe, But the Universe:

The Universe is all there is. By definition. By philosophical definition. Just by philosophical definition? Not so. Any logic is associated to a universe. If the “logic” is nature itself (“all of the logic”) the associated universe (in the Logic sense), is, well, the Universe.

If something some would want to call the “Multiverse”, whatever that would be, existed, it would be part of the Universe.

Galaxies Used To Be Called “Island Universes”. They Collide; This Is A Much Older Universe Than People Understand

***

Age Of The Universe? Really?

Befuddled physicists go around, telling us about the “First Three Minutes” (Weinberg; Electro-Weak Nobel laureate), or the “History Of Time” (Hawking; remarkable survivor-physicist in a wheelchair).

That rests on their perfect knowledge of how the universe evolved.

This, in turn, depends upon ignoring Dark Energy. Dark Energy shows up as an unpredicted acceleration of the expansion of the Universe.

The old theory of expansion of the Universe was established before Dark Energy was discovered.

So they think they know, but I know they don’t really know.

I don’t know if the Universe has an age. But it is aging, or, at least, let’s be more cautious, the Universe is changing.

***

How Both Physics And Mathematics Became Not Even Wrong:

Mathematics themselves have always been developed in particular directions, in light of what it was felt was needed to understand the physical world. That was certainly true with Buridan, and his students, who developed computational methods, and graphs, to handle what they wanted to do with inertia. That was true with calculus developed for all sorts of engineering and physics explanations.

And so on through the next three centuries. However, in the last three decades, what I personally viewed as extremely erroneous notions in physics became dominant.

Indeed, it had become that clear time was not “relative” (whatever that is supposed to mean). True, time was local, as per Relativity, but it was local in an absolute way. The absoluteness comes from Quantum Theory… And the absoluteness of curvature in cosmology (the focusing of light, by galaxies and galactic clusters is absolute, thus so is time, locally around such focusing objects!).

Efforts were launched towards was felt would be the mathematics of “superstrings” and “field theory”. That would have been wonderful, if the initial meta-axiom motivating the whole enterprise, that nature worked with strings, super, and field mathematics perched on field math, all the way down… had been, roughly, correct.

Mathematics is not “natural”. Or let’s say, not anymore “natural” than the human brain can get contrived. Mathematics is an adventure in what the geometry, the Quantum geometry, of neurology is capable of.

Mathematics is not unreasonably effective (as the famous physicist-mathematician Wigner put it).

Mathematics is reason, manipulated to be effective in a particular way. Correctly determining in advance what the way will be makes the difference between understanding nature, and failing to do so.

In other news, after the crash in France of a Lufthansa A320 plane, pundits will surely come, and claim aloud that air travel is the safest mode of travel.

Is it? It depends upon the method of measurement.

The way advertisers come up with the “air travel is the safest form of travel” statement is by dividing number of people killed by distance travelled.

However, another measure would be to divide the number of people killed by the number of travels they engaged in. This is a more significant measure to think about. And air travel looks much good that way: in just one day in Europe, more car travels happen than all the air travel for the entire world, in a year.

Not to say that air travel should be discouraged. It is not exactly like smoking, with no redeeming value, whatsoever. Families ought to be reunited. Getting to know other countries, encouraged. However one week tourism, far away, thanks to plane travel ought, in my opinion, to be discouraged.

Instead, the projections are that air travel will augment considerably in the next few decades.

Between Barcelona and Dusseldorf, one ought to be able to travel just as fast by rail (not all the high speed lines are built, nor will they be built, thanks to plutocratically imposed austerity, and subsidies to… air travel). Electric trains pollute much less, by more than an order of magnitude, and are much safer.

The global CO2 situation is that bad. Besides, look at that entire high school classroom of fifteen year old that went down with the plane… Just for a week in Barcelona?

Krugman just wrote “Plutocrats Against Democracy”. I have to comment much further about this pet subject of mine. Or how evil plutocrats collapse civilization. However, I got distracted meanwhile by an article on identity. (Some of the essay below is highly technical, requiring first year Quantum Mechanics; I recommend hyper jumps around the technical stuff, as the end contains a nice hook.)

The author says: “The philosophical problem of identity is epitomized by the paradox known as the “Ship of Theseus.” Suppose a ship is rebuilt by removing one plank at a time, and replacing it with a new plank of the same shape and material. Is it still the same ship?… suppose all the planks that were removed are brought together and used to construct a new ship of identical form. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to say that is the same ship as the original, and the one with new planks is a duplicate? There is no easy answer. Every possible reply seems to lead into a morass.

The Ship of Theseus and several related paradoxes have been tangling philosophers in knots for thousands of years, dating back to the ancient Greeks and continuing with Locke, Hume, Kant…”

It’s telling that the author evokes as authorities enslaving, racist “philosophers”. Those “philosophers”, or shall we call them racist slave masters? to sell their enslaving and racist philosophy, had to make us all stupid, and this is an esoteric example. In truth, there is no morass whatsoever.

In the old theory of atoms, the one Lucretius wrote a poem about, 2,000 years ago, atoms were all the same. So one could imagine a morass.

However, astoundingly, Quantum Physics has given us back a strong notion of identity. So strong it is, that Quantum Physics can be used to tell us if a message, a message which looks completely intact, has been read (this is the essence of “Quantum Cryptography”).

The author above also mentioned the duplication of the starship captain in Star Trek. I replied:

“Most people just adopt their philosophical identity without examining it. Thus millions of people are basically mental clones, philosophically speaking, and have no real Free Will, or personal identity (see the Islamic state).

However that does not mean one can extend the principle of replication to the real world. Twenty-five centuries old considerations and Star Trek are not the most up to date references.

Anybody with a serious knowledge of Quantum Physics would doubt that duplication is possible. Indeed replication requires the full inspection of the element to be duplicated. That’s impossible, from the so called Heisenberg Principle, the Uncertainty Principle intrinsic to waves.

Indeed, in Quantum Physics, the no-cloning theorem forbids the creation of identical copies of an arbitrary unknown quantum state. It was stated by Wootters & Zurek, and Dieks in 1982. It has profound implications in quantum computing.

The state of one system can be entangled with the state of another system. One can entangle two qubits. This is not cloning.

No well-defined state can be attributed to a subsystem of an entangled state (this is the essence of the Schrodinger/Einstein cat). Cloning is a process whose result is a separable state with identical factors. Publication of the no-cloning theorem was prompted by a proposal of Nick Herbert for a superluminal communication device using quantum entanglement.

Cloning would violate the no-teleportation theorem, which says classical teleportation (not to be confused with entanglement-assisted teleportation) is impossible.

Bill replied in turn that: “I can’t see anything I wrote that depends on an ability to replicate quantum states. (I’m not sufficiently into the Star Trek universe to know whether the Transporter is supposed to operate on that level, but that’s not how I was thinking about it.) Anyway, identical quantum states are not required for identity: a rock at two different times is in quite different quantum states, but it is still the same rock.”

I then made a crucial observation which escapes totally the Multiverse crowd:

Quantum States are NOT all that we are, but they are a great part of what we are. Real duplication would imply duplicating them, and that cannot be done.

Besides, saying that a “rock at two different times is in quite different quantum states, but it is still the same rock,” is, with all due respect, not correct.

Let’s call the quantum states lx>. According to the Hilbert axiomatics of QM, the rock is going to be: SUM over Ix> [(f(x;t) Ix>]. There t is one group parameter of transformation (known as” time”).

Thus the isolated rock is always in the same quantum states, although the mix may vary according to t, unbeknownst to us (this is the essence of the quantum cat paradox).

A rock at different times will be found in different quantum phases, but the same quantum states (this is the essence of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics given to Haroche from Ecole Normale Superieure Paris).

Quantum Physics has enormous implications even for something as simple as “identity”. Moreover, those implications are still under development. If they were not, we would already have Quantum Computers. But we do not.

Yet we know that biology can Quantum Compute. How? Birds can see the Earth’s magnetic field. That is only possible if birds use Spintronics, a type of Quantum Computing that barely works occasionally a bit in the lab, at very low temperatures.

Birds use it, in the wild, at room temperature, and see very well, thanks to it.

So Patrick Modiano got the Nobel Prize in literature, the 15th French to be so honored (Sartre declined it). Was it about France? Living in an imaginary world, full of imaginary friends?

I do not know Modiano’s work (but I have seen him try to talk on TV, many times in the past). Actually I do not know literature. Not anymore. Generally, it bores me to death. I used to read a lot, in my zeroes, including Dickens, Moby Dick, Hugo, Dumas. Later I did Voltaire, Moliere, Corneille, Shakespeare, lots of Latin authors (sometimes in the original, although that was time-consuming, somewhat pointless).

Rosny Aine’’s War of Fire (Guerre du Feu) and Victor Hugo made a lasting impression. But not as much as Caesar. Some other famous authors I found completely indigestible. Then came my teenage years pass: I grew up. My focus of inquiry turned to the real world. I found that wild baboons had more to say that was authentic, than self-admiring tycoons of letters parading in Paris’ smoky saloons.

What’s wrong with literature?

I watch French literature shows on TV, where famous authors come, and are interviewed. Some are well connected cuties, like Amelie Nothombe, who just made an entire book about drinking drugs, to great applause. She is a scion of an originally aristocratic English family whose father, somehow, ended as Belgian ambassador to Japan (thus the grandson of Britain’s Queen Victoria ended as Kaiser of Germany while his cousin was Czar of Russia). She sold millions of books, and she is as interesting as a door knob with a black hat.

So I watch those literature shows the French are obsessed with, and the scenario is always the same. Some guy (it’s most often a guy, barring the occasional cutie) comes and starts to speak about some fictitious character(s) whom he invented with letters, as if that creation had really existed.

Others swarm around, mouth gaping about the pathetic inventions, feeble echoes of a distant real universe, evoked by the great man, as if it had all really happened. They are exactly like little children with a bedtime story.

But all I see is some guy telling me about some people in his imagination, in his imaginary circumstances doing his imaginary things. I see the guy, I see him, I see his limitations, I see that he says what he says because of who he is. Generally somebody whose reality is far more mediocre, far more mundane thn the real reality out there.

Mundane is a problem. Mundane comes from the Old French mondain “of this world, worldly, earthly, secular.” Mondain has come to mean, in modern French “from the upper reaches of glittering high society”.

Methinks that the confusion between this very limited imaginary make-believe and the real world, contributes a lot to the gathering failure known as France, or, for that matter, the gathering failure of the West.

What do I propose instead?

I propose that those who sell (lots of) books are not necessarily the top intellectuals. Pure imagination looking at its own navel goes only that far (as Buddhism has amply demonstrated).

I propose that literature is not philosophy. Reading, and writing, children fables, is different from scathingly critical thinking (which top philosophy, or physics, has always to be… I am not talking about perfecting blue LEDs here).

In the particular case of Modiano, I should not be that critical. Like J. M. G. Le Clézio, here is an author that has deeply inquired about reality… Instead of just petting the masses.

Patrick Modiano’s Nobel, is, to some extent an acknowledgment that literature stands to gain much by interrogating the cold, real facts of the Dark Side of man. Modiano’s work is much about what happened during the more than four years during which France was occupied by the Nazis. He actually hunted down some facts, and the tragic fate, say, of a girl assassinated in Auschwitch (Dora Bruder).

The period, Nazism, was a great revelator of human nature, in all sorts of astounding ways, and has not been tapped enough that way. So, be it only for that, it’s excellent that Modiano got recognized (it’s not his first prize).

Modiano evokes a Nazi collaborator, who is also a Jew. No doubt it’s fun to ponder the facts. But reality is much more striking. A Jew like Hannah Arendt ended in her adviser’s bed, the extremely prominent and nefarious Nazi Martin Heidegger (himself a devout Catholic married to someone else).

After the war, Hannah and Martin made friends again. Hannah, by then famous, and an authentic resistance fighter, condemned whole sale the Jewish Councils for having collaborated with Hitler. She was right. But she was hated for it. She also did not get the Nobel, although this was a very important perspective upon human nature.

I have myself spent a lot of time mulling over the Nazi period, as it is an excellent teacher (so is the reaction of the Politically Correct about those who meditate on Nazism).

I do feel like imagining what went through Edwin Rommel’s mind, went he went from Nazi, mass murdering, war criminal monster in 1940, to somebody who, by 1944 stood in opposition to much of what he had fanatically propped up earlier.

However, I don’t feel as making up imaginative explanations I do not have a good evidence for.

Although I have read several dozens of thousands of pages on the subject, all of them claiming to depict reality, I have never opened a book of Modiano.

I have the same problem with Greco-Roman history. I enjoy the historians, and the original documents. But I cannot stand the fictionalized histories purporting to depict what happened. (I tried to read many of those.) The problem? They come short. They make palatable the unpalatable, thus losing the main point. “Presentism” degenerates not just history, but what history can teach about reality.

I have seen several movies purporting to depict Hitler. But I have the real books and documents where one can see Hitler thinking, for real, and that is much more instructive. Hitler thought of himself as an artistic genius (quite a bit like Nero), but others also thought he was a genius, and a kind one (!). Reading him in context explains why his monstrosity went undetected by the deliberately naive.

No novelist could depict Hitler for real, be it only because readers and critics would detest it, call it names, and the novelist will get no readers to speak of. Thus would not become a novelist, and even less, a Nobelist.

Novelism, Nobelism, literature, are all about marketing, in the end. It’s about the next best new (novel) thing which sells so well that a few old guys in Stockholm notice it.

“Littera” in Latin originally just mean “letter”, and, from that, a writing. Confusing whatever is written with reality is a disease. However, writing whatever as a possible imaginative path to reality, is a wisdom. A wisdom which, confronted to reality, always comes short. The trap of literature is to make feeble, marketable imagination, a fashion show, in other words, into all the reality that matters.

The Nobel Prize in literature will never replace the non-existent Nobel Prize in wisdom. But then, of course, only the wise can judge the wise. To the ant, the baboon is rather dumb to crush it under foot. There is nothing more unfair than mental capability, that’s why some try to compensate it, by offering bananas.